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MOOSIC - Following a family feud and a year's worth of delays in making site improvements, an ice cream shop that is a notorious spin-off of a longtime landmark is open for business.
Today, the Original Jitty Joe's begins serving the public at 3365 Birney Ave.
More than offering people a place to satisfy their sweet cravings, the business stands as a tribute to Joseph Tayoun - the founder of Jitty Joe's in Old Forge, who died in 2002.
"I'm doing this for my dad," said his son, Joe Tayoun, of Scranton.
He will run the shop with his cousin, Bill Sweeney, of Moosic.
After receiving conditional approval from the borough's Planning Commission on Wednesday, the pair announced plans to open today.
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When you're passion an ice-cream fix and a side order of reminiscence, Klavon's Ice Cream Parlor in the Strip District hits the spot. Klavon's hasn't changed much since owner Ray Klavon's grandparents opened their drug store and soda fountain in 1923. Customers still edge up to stools at the store's original 16-foot marble counter or slip into one of the wooden booths against the wall. The store retains its original art-deco details -- a black-and-ochre strips floor, stained-glass windows and frosty light fixtures. Look close enough, and you'll see proof of scratch left by the legendary 1936 St. Patrick's Day flood.
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Palm oil is a cheap vegetable oil used in products such as lipstick, soap, detergents, dry soups, ice cream and increasingly for so-called 'biofuels'. Global demand for palm oil is booming, and to meet this demand, industrial agriculture giants clear vast swaths of Paradise Forests in Southeast Asia to create palm oil plantations. This deforestation results in habitat loss, harm to local people species extinction, and global warming.
Paving Paradise
Forest destruction for the development of the palm oil industry is taking place primarily in the Asia/Pacific Paradise Forests, primarily in Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea (PNG). When deforestation is factored in, Indonesia is among the world's largest emitters of greenhouse gases. These Asian forests represent a green wall against uncontrollable climate change. Their destruction results in irreplaceable biodiversity loss and increased global warming due to the release of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Twenty percent of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions are the result of deforestation.
Forest destruction is worst where forests grow on peatlands, like in large parts of Southeast Asia. Peatlands store vast amounts of carbon, globally up to 528 billion tons (70 times the current annual global emissions from fossil fuel burning). Emissions from current deforestation on SE Asia's peatlands alone, equals to almost 8 percent of global emissions from fossil fuel burning. Riau province in Sumatra, subject to a massive expansion of palm oil plantations, alone comprises 4 million hectares of peatland (the size of Taiwan), storing 14.6 billion tonnes of carbon. If these peatlands are destroyed, the resulting emissions would equal an entire year of mankind's global greenhouse gas emissions.
Magnificent animals now threatened by this deforestation include the Sumatran tiger, rhino, elephant, birds of paradise, and the critically endangered orang utan. Indonesia contains between 10-15 percent of all known species of plants, mammals and birds that make up the world's biodiversity. Borneo and Sumatra, now host the world's remaining orang utans. They depend on the forest for food and nesting sites. According to the Centre for Orangutan Protection, at least 1,500 orang-utans died in 2006 as a result of deliberate attacks by plantation workers.
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Here are some tips and tricks for great, stress-free ice cream.
1. If you make the ice cream mix the day before you freeze up it, you'll get a smoother product and a higher yield.
2. Homemade ice cream needs to be in the freezer for at least 3 to 3 1/2 hours after you make it and before you serve it.
3. Place freshly made ice cream in the center of your freezer without crowding; it will freeze more quickly and evenly.
4. If you have a little bit of ice cream left but not enough to serve, twirl it into the next batch you make to get exclusive flavors.
5. Take advantage of tasty, affordable, seasonal fruit when you make ice cream. Just be sure fruit is fully ripe.
6. If you don't like large chunks of fruit in your ice cream, sprinkle the fruit and berries with sugar and mash them with a potato masher or wooden spoon first. This also releases a lot of flavor from the fruit.
7. Liquids like extracts, liquors and flavoring oils should be added to the custard base once it has cooled slightly but before freezing.
8. A wire whisk is the best tool for mixing liquid ingredient. Save the wooden spoon for risotto.
9. Store your ice cream in an airtight pot.
10. Here are three tips for the ice/salt combination used to freeze ice cream:
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"Wow, wow!" were the comments made by all the students at our recent Ice Cream University seminars just completed at the Ice Cream University Culinary Institute in West Orange, New Jersey and at the San Francisco Baking Institute, South San Francisco, California, with our guest instructor Giacomo Schiavon of La Sorbetteria, Bologna, Italy.
Because of the fantastic response to Giacomo's first trip to the USA in 2007 where over 49 students were wowed with his expertise, we brought him back. Giacomo is a master gelato maker who practices his amazing art at his gelateria in Bologna. We are to have him, He is one of the best we have encountered in Italy. He showed us how his passion for the art of gelato making can be translated for us to a new level. His trip to the USA was a partnership with Carpigiani USA and Ice Cream University.
This year's workshops attracted 23 participants from around the country who wanted to learn more about gelato making. With the help of Bill Lambert and Malcolm Stogo of Ice Cream University, Giacomo demonstrated his approach to creating his vanilla and chocolate bases and some of his outstanding classical Bolognese flavors like Ricotta Cheese gelato with a Fig Variegate and his Italian version of what we call Tiramisu using Mascarpone cheese.
Let me tell you something about him and his renowned gelateria in Bologna, La Sorbertteria. When I first walked into his shop several years ago, I felt something that is hard to explain. It was the anticipation that I was going to experience something that I was not prepared for. And then it hit me when I tasted his pistachio for which he makes his own paste. It had the most extraordinary flavor. It was smooth and clean but with a burst of pure pistachio flavor that is exceptional. It was a WOW experience, which I have always wanted to share with my students. Take it from me, you have never tasted such flavor anywhere, and everyone who attended our recent workshops said the same thing, "WHAT AN AMAZING EXPERIENCE!"
Ice Cream University is the educational arm of Malcolm Stogo Associates founded by Malcolm Stogo, a renowned international ice cream consultant and author of five books on ice cream production, marketing and getting into the business.
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Ice Cream University proudly announces the winner of its fifth annual ICE CREAM STORE OF THE YEAR AWARD known as THE PASSION AWARD.
The 2008 winner is Christie Hauck of Bravo Gelato of Nashville, TN voted the very best ice cream shop in the United States by Bill Lambert and Malcolm Stogo.
The purpose of the award is to honor the very best, and Bravo Gelato certainly demonstrates this in its passion for making its gelato shops great, making the very best frozen dessert product, sharing their enthusiasm with employees and customers, and for not giving up in the face of the adversity.
Bravo Gelato has five retail locations and over 25 wholesale accounts in the Nashville area, the best being at the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center. What is so special and unique about Bravo Gelato is having a founder and owner who is one very creative guy: Christie Hauck. His famous cookie concept - Christie Cookies - is world famous. Using the knowledge of the cookie business, he has created some amazing flavors that jump out at you. So from the beginning Christie's Bravo Gelato has had terrific brand recognition with the public-at-large in Nashville.
In addition to a great-tasting product, what added to our excitement about their passion is the way they handled their adversity from a major employee theft that almost put them out of business. For a great majority of people facing the same situation, it would have been easier to give up. Not Christie and Melissa Hauck. They simply refused and continued to grow their business.
To us, this is passion- passion in what you are doing in a way that tests your ability to get up off the ground, and say, not us. So, we believe that in all the years we have given a Passion Award, this passion has clearly been over and beyond anything we have ever seen.
As the winner of the 2008 Passion Award, Bravo Gelato will receive the following:
* A free scholarship to any ICE CREAM UNIVERSITY 2008 SEMINAR.
* An invitation to be a guest instructor at one of our 2008 seminars.
* Bravo Gelato's own page on our www.icecreamuniversity.org web page describing its concept for one year.
* A plaque and certificate designating Bravo Gelato as 2008 PASSION AWARD winner.
The Passion Award has been evolving as we have watched our students come to us with a passion to enter the Incredible Ice Cream Business, but with limited knowledge on how to move forward. Bravo Gelato has PASSION, and has shown this passion every day they have been in business.
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My first attempt at making cherry ice cream involved a bleak winter day and frozen cherries from Albertson's. The results were predictably flavorless and rather dismal. Good cherries are essential for cherryice cream . So this time I purchased fresh, organic cherries and pitted them myself, flinging bright red cherry juice all over the kitchen so that it looked like something you'd expect on CSI, minus Gil Grissom and the little flashlights. The clean-up was a pain, but it was totally worth it. (I personally recommend making the Cherry Almond Delight variation.) P.S. The red food coloring is totally optional, but it makes theice cream much prettier than the reddish-brown natural cherry color.
2 c. pitted cherries, quartered
1/2 - 3/4 c. sugar, depending on how sour your cherries are
Splash of water
2 c. almond milk (or any non-dairy milk)
2 T. arrowroot powder
1 t. vanilla extract
1/2 - 1 t. almond extract (optional)
Few drops red food coloring (optional)
Directions:
Place 1/4 cup of the pitted cherries and the sugar in a medium saucepan. Add a tiny splash of water and bring to a boil, stirring to mix the sugar and the cherries. Once the cherries are getting soft and yummy and sweet, pour them into a blender and puree.
Pour the puree back into the saucepan and add the almond (or other non-dairy) milk. Bring the mixture back to a boil. When the mixture has just started to boil, take off the heat and immediately stir in the arrowroot slurry. This should immediately cause the liquid to thicken (not a lot, but a noticeable amount; it will be thicker when it cools).
Add the vanilla and almond extract (if using). Add red food coloring until you're happy with the shade of pink/red.
Set the ice cream mixture aside to cool. Freeze according to your ice cream maker's instructions. Add remaining cherries in the last five minutes of freezing.
Variations:
Cherry Almond Delight: Definitely use 1 teaspoon almond extract. Add 1/4 cup sliced, toasted almonds along with the sliced cherries in the last five minutes of freezing.
Cherry Chocolate Chip: Add 3/4 cup chocolate chips along with the sliced cherries in the last five minutes of freezing.
Dandy Brandy Cherry: Add 1/4 to 1/2 cup cherry brandy after the ice cream mixture has cooled, but before you freeze it.
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Thanks to research efforts led by Dr. Barry D. Weiss, a professor of family and community medicine at The University of Arizona College of Medicine, health-care providers soon will have access to a new tool designed to assess a patient's health literacy skills quickly and simply. Knowing if a patient can understand and act on health information enables the physician and nurse to tailor their communication and enhance patient understanding.
Dr. Weiss and his team of UA researchers, working in collaboration with colleagues at the University of North Carolina, have developed the Newest Vital Sign, the first instrument of its kind. A simple, six-question assessment based on an ice cream nutrition label, the Newest Vital Sign (NVS) enables the health-care provider to assess an individual's health literacy skills - the ability to read, understand and act upon health information - quickly and accurately. It is the only such rapid assessment tool developed in Spanish, as well as English.
Reports issued by the Institute of Medicine, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and the American Medical Association in 2004 indicate that as many as half of all adults in the United States have low health literacy. They lack the skills needed to function adequately in today's complicated health-care environment. Difficulty in navigating the complexities of health care, from interpreting instructions for medications and self-care regimens to understanding insurance and informed-consent documents, often leads to other problems, including non-compliance with health-care instructions, failure to seek preventive care, longer hospital stays and higher health-care costs.
In the clinical paper, "Quick Assessment of Literacy in Primary Care: The Newest Vital Sign," to be published in the Dec. 6 issue of the Annals of Family Medicine, Dr. Weiss says that current literacy screening instruments for health-care settings either take too much time to administer for routine use or are available only in English. The Newest Vital Sign, on the other hand, can be administered in only 3 minutes and is available in Spanish and English.
During an office visit, the Newest Vital Sign can be used to assess health literacy skills at the same time the patient's other vital signs, such as blood pressure, are taken. The patient is first given the ice cream nutrition label by the nurse or physician, and then is asked a series of questions about it. Based on the number of correct answers given, health-care providers can assess the patient's health literacy level and adjust the way they communicate with the patient to ensure understanding.
"Many physicians are unaware of the large number of patients who have limited health literacy. The Newest Vital Sign instrument can help them to find out the situation in their own practice," says Dr. Weiss. "Low health literacy is a silent epidemic, so providers need a simple and fast way to identify those patients in their practice at greatest risk."
According to the non-profit group Partnership for Clear Health Communication, a coalition of national organizations working to promote awareness of and solutions for low health literacy, literacy skills are a stronger predictor of a person's health status than age, income, employment status, educational level and racial or ethnic group. While ethnic minority groups are disproportionately affected by low literacy, the majority of those with low literacy skills in the United States are white, native-born Americans.
Health information often is difficult to understand, but some people are especially vulnerable in a health-care situation, including the elderly, recent immigrants (who may be highly literate in their own language), people with chronic disease and those with low socioeconomic status.
Profound social and economic effects are associated with this condition. Costs to the American health-care system caused by excess hospitalizations and emergency care, errors by patients in their self treatment and other problems associated with limited health literacy, are estimated to be between $58 billion and $73 billion per year. One study found that patients with a lower-than-third-grade reading level averaged more than $10,000 in annual Medicaid costs, while the Medicaid program spent less than $3,000 on those with better than third-grade reading levels.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recognizes health literacy as an important issue, and it is a priority on U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona's agenda. In a statement issued last April, former HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson said, "Health literacy can save lives, money and improve the health of millions of Americans. It goes to the core of our health-care system. Improving the ability of Americans to obtain, process and understand basic health information is essential to our strategy on prevention."
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Chocolate and mint go so well together, and now that candy canes are everywhere, I just had to mix the two. If you want to skip the chocolate for pure candy cane bliss, just follow the recipe variation listed below.
2 c. soy creamer (or any non-dairy milk)
1 c. soy milk (or any non-dairy milk)
3/4 c. sugar
11/2c. chocolate chips
2 T. arrowroot
1 t. vanilla extract
2 t. peppermint extract
1 c. chopped candy canes
Mix 1/4 cup of soy milk with the 2 tablespoons of arrowroot and set aside.
Mix the soy creamer, soy milk, sugar, and chocolate chips together in a saucepan. Heat gently until the chocolate melts, then bring to a boil. When the mixture has just started to boil, take off the heat and immediately stir in the arrowroot slurry. This should immediately cause the liquid to thicken (not a lot, but a noticeable amount; it will be thicker when it cools).
Add the vanilla and peppermint extracts.
Set the ice cream mixture aside to cool. Freeze according to your ice cream maker's instructions. Add the chopped candy canes in the last 5 minutes of freezing.
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The blazing sun of midday was hot enough on its own. Standing in suffocating lines with hundreds of people only made me hotter. My tongue was dry. Sweat ran down my forehead. All I wanted was a scoop of ice cream. Boy, was I in luck. Instead of one scoop, I got 24. I was at an ice cream tasting event on a sidewalk in St. Paul, Minnesota, outside Izzy's Ice Cream Cafe. Each spring, Izzy's asks people to submit their dream ice cream flavors. Then, for 3 hours on one day in June, the cafe makes 24 of the flavor ideas and invites everyone to come, taste, and vote. Winners receive "People's Flavor Awards," and Izzy's makes the top choice available for a whole year. Submissions were grouped into 6 categories: Chocolate, Sorbet, Mix-in, Fruit, Specialty, and Kids (entered by kids who are 12 years old or younger). Tickets cost $10, which entitled each ticket-holder to an unlimited number of golf-ball-sized scoops. After the tasting, we voted for a flavor in each category and an overall winner, or "Best-in-Show." The event, now in its fifth year, seems to grow more popular every year. This year, with brilliant sunshine and temperatures nearing 90 degrees, the lines snaked around the block. The wait for chocolate flavors was especially long. Sorbets were much easier to get. My favorites included chocolate chip banana bread ice cream and a chocolate flavor with strawberries, peanut butter, and saltine crackers. I also appreciated Mexican vanilla poppyseed, rice ice cream with raisins and cardamom, and a cinnamon-based ice cream with chunks of minidonuts in it. Some flavors were too weird for me. I didn't like the chocolate with tea combo, for one. Vanilla ice cream with jelly and sesame crackers was too spicy. And I liked the first bite of mango salsa my tongue started to burn from the kick. The overall winner was named "SpongeBob." It was vanilla ice cream with chunks of fruity sponge cake. A kid entered that one. It was too sweet for me, but the rest of the crowd must have liked it a lot. I'm already dreaming up ideas for next year's competition. Banana ice cream with peanut butter cookie chunks, chocolate chips, and pretzels, perhaps. Or maybe I'll suggest chocolate with coconut, strawberries, and brownies.
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